MEMORY KEEPING 101 – STORING AND CURATING YOUR PHOTOS ON FOREVER
Why Forever?
Back in November I introduced you to Forever Storage and the reasons I think it is best way to store your photos online. If you would like to review that post, click here, but here’s a chart that spells it out.
Perhaps the best part of a Forever account is that you buy your storage rather than rent it. Think about the difference in a landlord and a tenant. With other storage systems, your photos are merely tenants on someone else’s property. The landlord makes the rules. The landlord has a right to enter the property. The landlord is responsible for maintenance and you’re screwed if they don’t do it. If the landlord changes the rules, you either have to live with it or you’re stuck with the new rules. The list goes on.
At Forever, you own the property your photos are stored on. You make the rules about your photos. No one can go in there without your permission. No one can change the rules without your permission. You can do as much or as little as you like with your photos. It’s yours.
When you’re renting space for your photos, if you don’t make your rent payment, you lose access to your photos and what’s more, they don’t even have a plan for you to pass on your space, even if you want to. At Forever, you buy your space, so it belongs to you and whoever comes along after you.
Fully Customized Organization
I’ve used a lot of different online storage products in my life and while they will give you all the space in the world for a small monthly fee, your options for setting up your library are always limited. When I first started using Forever, I didn’t even know how to appreciate the flexibility I was given. It took me a while to create a system that worked for me, because it’s not just a matter of fill in the blanks.
It didn’t take long for me to get the hang of it and now I love it. Forever keeps a library of everything you upload to the site and with a few query words you can get to exactly what you want, You also get to set up whatever albums you want and then nest albums under there to as many levels as you want. Each album you access quickly tells you how many photos are in that album and how many nested albums you have within that album.
Within any album, you get to chose the order you want them in and if none of the automatic choices work, you can create your own.
As you set up your albums and nested albums, you can create a name for them and then you can fully describe what the album is about and if you want, put a date or date range on it.
Tagging is a breeze, but that’s only the beginning of the ways you can identify your photos with Forever.
Most online photo storage picks up information from your metadata and you’re stuck with whatever is there. Not with Forever. You have total control.
Just because it was Conger-7 wherever you got it from doesn’t mean it has to stay that. If the date taken is really just the date you uploaded it, you can change it to the real date.
Want that photo to be in other albums? That’s easy and it doesn’t take up more of your storage to do that.
And the description? None of that 25 words or 100 character stuff. Tell the whole story. Don’t want to key it in, fine, go to the app and use voice to tell the story. You’re not going to run out of space.
Sharing
While Forever will stay out of your storage and diligently protect it from others who shouldn’t be in there, it’s got all kinds of ways to share your images when you want to do so. You can share a single shot or an entire album or even your whole account. You can also set a level of sharing for the top level of each album. You might have some items you want to stay private, just for you. Friends and Family could have their own level of access to other albums. Then you could even have public items you opened up to whoever wanted to see them, so it’s great for all kinds of applications like teams, schools or other groups.
There are other ways to give the people you want access to your files. You can collaborate with others in you albums and decide what level of collaboration you want them to have. You can set up a manager and allow them to act as you if you want. You can also designate who you want to have access and control of your files and which files after you. Try that with icloud!
Auto Uploading
Have you ever wished that every photo you took on your phone or added to Facebook could be captured permanently somewhere so you never have to worry about losing them? Forever can do that. Or you can do one or the other of them. Up to you!
So What’s the Bad News?
If you’ve been using a free service or have been paying $1.99 per month for 100 gigabytes of storage, the bad news at Forever is sticker shock. The first time you hear how much 100 GB of storage costs at Forever it is going to be a difficult pill to swallow.
I must be honest with you. While I love Forever storage, I have to admit I don’t like all the rigmarole it takes to figure out how much you have to pay. On the day in November I wrote this post, with all the various deals and discounts available, you could get 100 GB of storage for $387.98 or something close to that (according to how you stacked the deals). However, the retail price for 100 GB of storage is $1000. I think that’s crazy, but someone smarter than me dreamed up this pricing and if you’ve ever shopped at Macy’s or Kohl’s, it will seem familiar. (This dress is $400, but today with a coupon you can get it for $19.99.)
So, while $387.98 is a lot, it’s really not fair to compare it with the $1.99 a month at Google, for instance. Google can rent that space for that price, because they owe you nothing in the way of privacy or security. They also know they will be able to make money off your photos with data mining and advertising. If they lose all your pictures, that’s OK. They can compress your photos anytime they want, so they will take up less space. If they want to delete your photos, all they have to do is send you an email and if you miss it, that’s tough. They also have your permission to use it for whatever else they want to.
On the other hand – all you will ever pay for your Forever storage is $387.98. After 16 years, when you’ve paid Google that much (if they don’t raise the price, which they most likely will) you’ll still have to go on paying something every month and if your kids take over the account, then they will have to keep paying as will your grandkids, great grandkids or whoever of your decedents is still around – if Google is still around. Remember VCRs? Which reminds me, that you Forever account will be upgraded for free to whatever formats come around after .jpg or whatever has disappeared.
Chances are at this point I have confused you more than I have helped you, so give me a call and lets review this. Whenever you decide you want to purchase your storage, I will research the deals at the time and make sure you get the best of them.
Come back next week and we’ll dig beyond mere storage and see what else Forever has to offer.
jane sadek 